Ola hires ex-Flipkart president Joy Bandekar to lead new initiatives

Online cab aggregator Ola has appointed Joy Bandekar as its corporate president to lead new initiatives and will be a part of Ola’s core leadership team. Interestingly, ET Tech had reported this development last month, where it said that Bandekar would be responsible for advocating a favourable regulatory environment for Ola to run in.

Before joining Ola, Bandekar worked with Flipkart as its corporate president for over 3 years, before which he worked with Medi Assist Healthcare in a similar position for a short duration. Prior to that, he was the Director and head of corporate affairs at eBay for over 6.5 years. Bandekar has also worked as an officer to Goa’s chief minister for about 2 years, an officer to the minister for agriculture, shipping and civil aviation for the Indian Government for almost 3 years and as station manager at ATCOM Technologies for about 1.5 years. Before that, he worked with Reliance Industries and Maxworth Orchards India as assistant manager for 2 years and over 1.5 years respectively, and as a marketing engineer at Kirloskar Brothers for less than a year.

Other appointments:

– Towards the end of last month, Ola appointed Rajiv Bansal as its CFO. Bansal would be a part of Ola’s core leadership team and join the company starting January 2016.

– In July, the company appointed Sundeep Sahni as the VP of new initiatives. Sahni previously co-founded and was the MD (Indonesia) of the Lazada Group.

– In the same month, Pallav Singh, the senior VP of operations at Ola, took over as the CEO of TaxiForSure after Arvind Singhal resigned.

– Ola also appointed Arun Sarin as an independent director to its board of directors. Sarin was the CEO of the Vodafone Group for 5 years and serves as an advisor on the boards of Cisco Systems, Charles Schwab, Blackhawk Networks and Safeway, Inc.

– In February, the company hired Sunit Singh as vice-president of design and Yugantar Saikia as its vice-president of human resources.

Global alliance: Last week, Ola, Didi Kuaidi, Lyft and GrabTaxi joined hands in a strategic alliance and will start rolling out products in the first quarter of 2016. Ola and GrabTaxi have joined the alliance initially started by Lyft and Didi Kuaidi in September and claims to cover 50% of the world’s population across Southeast Asia, India, China and the US.